LEAPS : Help Needed

[RogerI...@aol.com]

I've been working for quite some time now on a project that I call LEAPS, the Local Electronic Area Positioning System. The idea is to provide very high resolution positioning information to agricultural and outdoor hobbyist robots. Standard GPS, the kind you might have for your car or built in to your iPod, can provide accuracy down to ten or so feet. Enhanced GPS can provide resolution down to the centimeter level, but can cost up to $2,000 per unit and include a costly, yearly subscription to an enhanced data provider. I'm aiming for a low cost (couple hundred dollars, tops) high resolution (to within inches) product.

 

The initial motivation for this was my brother's Christmas tree farm in New Jersey. A substantial amount of the labor, and hence the cost, of such a farm is the cutting of the grass between the rows of trees. It takes several hours of every day during the entire growing season to keep the grass cut, even when you only have twenty or so acres, and some such "small farms" can be a hundred acres or more. I figured there must be a way to do that with a mowing robot, but there are no such robots that can handle the task, primarily because of lack of sufficiently high positional accuracy. A sufficiently accurate positioning system would solve not only that problem but also be applicable to many, many other agricultural situations as well as outdoor hobbyist robots.  

 

I've built a proof-of-concept setup and it works. I've written the RF communications software, the image analysis / robot tracking software, and coupled it with some RF devices, a couple of webcams and some laptops. And it works.

 

But that's a long way from having an actual product.

 

What I need is an electronics / product development engineer who would be willing to take a look at the overall concept, discuss the various issues and options, so that together we can figure out whether it's possible to turn it into an actual product. And if the answer to that is Yes, to work together with me to make it a reality.

 

- Roger Garrett